HOMAGE TO ART(2008)

a strong commentary on what is art

You would notice that my dormroom door has sign on it. It says:

Let this signage be named as Homage to Art(2008) made by Adrian Mendizabal as a protest

Well, frankly, i don't want to put it in the most blatant sense, but this is a protest. A protest for what? OKAY! here is Adrian again nagging about culture and art without doing anything for the betterment of the world at large. So why a protest?

This is speaking not just as a cinephile but an art hell-raiser. Art is something you don't speak in an absolute sense. When one talks about art one cannot reach a conclusion of a yes or a no, or an 'i agree' or a 'it sucks'. I want to make a protest by putting the URL and the name of my BLOG in front of my door so that if anyone, especially my dormates, sees it one must know the following things:

1) The sign denotes a blog, obviously. An art existing in a written form actualized in cyberspace.

2) It's made originally by the person inside the door. This is an attack to the authenticity of art nowadays. is there any authentic art? Has intertexuality defined my post-modernism consumed authentic feeling of art? The sign by door defines the idea of authenticity. It acts like a label that within this door lies the owner, but this owner can be split into two: it either denotes my roommate or me. So this brings us to another level.

3.) The sign is a label. I am particularly against stereotyping. I hate stereotypes. I put the sign in the door as label to insult those who like to put labels on arts works. When one 'boxes' a certain concept like poverty or lower class i.e. 'poor' people don't have the capacity to view what is good art and what is not. I like to insult them by putting a signage on door which labels the door and the owner of the sign.

4.) It has no color. I protest against the sentimentals! i find sentimentality a distraction for an artwork. And this is a protest against the sentimentality of mainstream Philippine cinema. I fin d unsentimental themes universal and more precise. There is a clear distinction between emotional and sentimental: 'emotional' attempts a universal idea while 'sentimental' plagiarizes it. it mimics the emotional to appeal to the audience in an erroneous and loose manner.

5.) It is printed using a computer printer and covered with a clear tape. It composed of almost nothing but text on a blank white paper cut with distinctive boundaries. With this i protest against the connoisseurship nowadays. I want to challenge them to accept this not as a signage on my dormroom but a piece of art. I made it to be it using my ADOBE photoshop CS2. It's authentic, it depicts an ideology, it has a form and a context. Fundamentally, it is an art. And it can exists that way. To connoisseurs it may look like a piece of trash, but this is not how i see it. It's an art work that defeats the purpose of "what is art in a conventional sense". In a simple sense, it's an art work against 'art'. It needs no quality definable by current trends on art because it uses simple materials like paper, ink, and clear tape. However, it cannot be repeated or reproduced, even by the same artist because it uses unique proportions of clear tape, angles of paper cut, and amount of ink embedded on it.

My protest is rather implicit. So if you are an Ipil resident who happened to spot on that signage it'll be grateful to treat it as an art piece in protest to the things that i mentioned above. I name it, "HOMAGE TO ART".

But perhaps this post isn't complete without any personal agenda to discuss.

I would like to share to you my notebook, shown below:

Of course, with the presence of the two five-peso coin, the meaning of this photo is bereft with connotations. One would think, is Adrian trying to say something about the economy or the crisis? No, dear friends, I am not. but in arts, one can say this and attempt to come up with grandiose explanations about the significant of the elements present in the artwork. I must claim that everyone must function as an aesthete once in his own life to be happy. An aesthete works well when he's in need of something beyond him. Immaterial reality, that is.

Look at the notebook. It's an art work. It has contents which springs back in my high school years. Look at it carefully. Can you see the inside? can you? of course you cannot. One cannot find the point, function, or essence of this notebook without looking inside. There, as soon as you turn the first page, you'll see something eventual. But i won't tell you what it is. It is up to you to decide whether to open the notebook or not. I ask you, is essence, for you, more important than the appearance of things, or otherwise? I ask another, are you happy?

Without a word, i praise CURT DUCASSE. His writings are inevitable. He made me cry.

I also suggest to look at this (see picture below):

Are you familiar with this piece of art? This art is new. This art is embeded on my phone by an artist. He must have recognized it's essence. He must have recognized that this piece of art is tantamount to PICASSO's Guernica (1937) because of it's sheer depth and tempting semiotics.

"Guernica" by Pablo Picasso (1937)

With this, all else shall unfolds. It will start with my Homage on Art(2008). This is because i have to lead this declining art culture into a revolution.